Welcome to the Forum Archive!

Years of conversation fill a ton of digital pages, and we've kept all of it accessible to browse or copy over. Whether you're looking for reveal articles for older champions, or the first time that Rammus rolled into an "OK" thread, or anything in between, you can find it here. When you're finished, check out the boards to join in the latest League of Legends discussions.

It's certainly true that the utility scaling thing has been a huge flop to date.

I think it can work and be awesome, but in order for that to happen, Riot has to put utility scaling on more powerful effects than Soraka Q, Janna W, or Sona E.

I imagine a world where Alister W knocks back farther and Janna Q travels faster. I want Soraka W to grant armor for longer with more AP. I really think you can make scaling utility worth having less scaling damage...but Riot hasn't done it yet.

Alistar headbutt seems like it could be counterproductive. He's a tank too, and AP scaling on tanks is not as useful. Soraka perfectly hard counters AD casters besides Talon (who silences Soraka before she can do **** about him.) unless you made the duration VERY short. Janna Q traveling faster is interesting but has the potential to **** with player expectations. (It's the most viable idea of those, however.)

Meanwhile, you **** over the Dominion playerbase even harder by making champs who actually got a net power GAIN in the preseason 4 changes and were already potent in Season 3 even more potent. (Besides Thresh, who will get no buffs and still remain the Crystal Scar's equivalent of early season 2 Eve/mid season 3 Olaf until the map gets relaunched sometime in late 2015.) You also make ARAM unplayable if you so much as touch supports for buffs.

Riot does not want AP to remove the options of people to deal with supports, although putting AP scaling on more potent effects might be worthwhile.

The issue is more "not enough items that are both actual options on supports and have enough AP to provide any useful benefit." Lulu is quite capable of making people into rocket trains, but she can't do that AND get actual support items.

Make Talisman active's speed scale with ability power and nerf it overall. Buff FQC, possibly by making it restore mana on proccing the passive and mainly by giving it more AP. Give FQC an upgrade into a support version of Rabadon's Deathcap. Those are more viable options.

Alistar headbutt seems like it could be counterproductive. He's a tank too, and AP scaling on tanks is not as useful. Soraka perfectly hard counters AD casters besides Talon (who silences Soraka before she can do **** about him.) unless you made the duration VERY short.

My overall idea here is to illustrate that there are many potential utility scaling effects that are more impactful than "X slows a bit more" or "Y shreds a little more MR". Even when these effects are actually quite strong, they don't read well. Lulu W, on the other hand, is both strong and reads well.

As to the specifics:
-If you don't want more knockback, you don't have to buy AP on Alistar. There's not really a playstyle we're eliminating here, it's about providing more build options. However, it is possible that "knocks back farther" is more synergistic on Janna R than Alistar W.
-Re: Soraka, the idea is to go from two seconds to three, not two seconds to ten. The effect doesn't have to be enormous to make support players feel good about building AP. I do feel like Soraka ought to be strong against AD casters; so long as she isn't pushing them out of viability, I'm fine with it.

Quote:

Tortferngatr:

Meanwhile, you **** over the Dominion playerbase even harder by making champs who actually got a net power GAIN in the and were already potent in Season 3 even more potent. (Besides Thresh, who will get no buffs and still remain the Crystal Scar's equivalent of early season 2 Eve/mid season 3 Olaf until the map gets relaunched sometime in 2015.) You also make ARAM unplayable if you so much as touch supports for buffs.

I couldn't possibly care less about any of this. We already know that the plan for Dominion balance is map-specific balance changes and the plan for ARAM is for it not to be balanced.

Quote:

Tortferngatr:

Riot does not want AP to remove the options of people to deal with supports.

I don't really see a case for how applying utility scaling to more effects does this. I mean, obviously you can make any mechanic crazy OP with numbers, but given reasonable values I think utility scaling is quite tunable.

Quote:

Tortferngatr:

The issue is more "not enough items that are both actual options on supports and have enough AP to provide any useful benefit." Lulu is quite capable of making people into rocket trains, but she can't do that AND get actual support items out of the deal.

Support itemization is indeed a jumbled mess. If they want supports to buy AP, they certainly didn't create any efficient ways to do that in the support items. All of the best support items (Talisman, Mikael's, Locket) have a big fat 0 AP.

It makes you think they didn't really think this whole "supports should break even with the old values around 200 AP" thing through. Maybe they were hoping to do a pass over support itemization later and ran out of time in the budget.

Sorry to say but the gold changes are not what put Annie into the support role.
The reason I say this is because she was already there before the changes. Even before the utility scaling the supports were still to heavily nerfed.